Emotional Outlet
I can’t seem to stop tinkering with my gardens. It must go hand in hand with my jiggling leg syndrome. When you’re a kid they called it having ants in your pants. As an adult it’s called any number of things from nervous energy to OCD. What I have is far less difficult than an obsession and far less aggressive than a compulsion, but it is some sort of disorder nonetheless. Kim is generally very tolerant of whatever it is that I have as it relates to the yard and garden. We have this running joke that she bows to the goddess Coco Chanel, who famously said that a woman should take off one piece of jewelry before she goes out because less is more. My rejoinder to that is always that I attended the Michael Milken School of achievement, where more is actually considered more. Ha ha ha, Broadway and Wall Street once again prove to revert to form. We solve that difference by me letting Kim do what she wants in the house and by her letting me do what I want outside. Nonetheless, I do try to make her aware of my plans for several reasons. First and foremost, she is my life partner and I like sharing things with her. Then there is the fact that everyone that likes to get a little avant garde likes to check themselves at times and be sure that they haven’t crossed the line into stupid. I have wandered into stupid enough times to understand the value of getting a second opinion. And last but not least, there is positive affirmation value in asking if an idea works and if I should start patting myself on the back for thinking of it. Yesterday she suggested that I may have gone too far with an added wind spinner.
It’s a fine line between maintenance and refreshing and then simply adding bells and whistles. I guess the best evidence that I am less a gardener than a property showman is that I absolutely keep adding bells and whistles. I don’t think benches are either a bell or a whistle. To me, a garden is a place for restful contemplation of nature and my hillside is enough of a slope in every which direction that I feel totally justified by having the 13 benches that I have. They are well spread out and only clustered a bit down at the games area and the Cecil Garden. And then there are my pots, all of which are now placed and planted with succulents from my own gardens. To me, pots are an accent piece, not a bell or whistle. They provide a splash of color and perhaps a slight change in planting elevation. I think they are additive to the garden atmosphere and not at all a distraction.
The distractions come in three forms and I have a hard time saying they aren’t each their own form of bell or whistle. The first is the boulder art. This all started when my nephew Jason painted an Otomi design on the garden wall which is actually the outside of the guest bedroom. It is a magnificent and colorful 12’ wreath with hummingbirds, quail and the sun/moon combination. It is a true work of art. It inspired me to use the spray paint liberally on the various large boulders on the back hillside. I have refrained from doing that on the front boulders, but in back I have painted various plants, celestial bodies, critters and Anasazi symbols (a vestige of my Utah days). I have done these with stencils and free-hand, but always with spray paint. Call that my pent-up artistic flair coming out. I am also a fan of metal art both in combination with the boulders and on a stand-alone basis. I have used this mostly in the back, but put some in the front yard as well.
Combining basic elements like metal and stone or metal and wood, or, for that matter, stone and wood, has always intrigued me. I think that interest began when I had a summer home in the Hamptons for almost fifteen years. That was the fifteen years before I met Kim. I bought the house when my first marriage ended and I felt I needed a home base for being with my kids. I was never much of a Hamptons guy before that, the Hamptons being the summer playground of the NYC monied set. I had been more of Berkshires kinda guy, where building rock gardens on the wooded slopes was more my thing than sitting in the sun by the pool. But something Westhampton Beach (technically I lived in Quiogue) offered in abundance were galleries. At one of those galleries I stumbled upon the sculpture art of Lubomir Tomaszewski, a Polish-born artist from Connecticut who started the Emotionalism school of art. The New York Times said of his art “The most effective among the pieces are the animals or birds that convey the state of tension or movement or brute strength, something that struggles against gravity to maintain its force.” His artistic movement was characterized by the man himself as, “playing an important role in individual and social life, …a positive relationship to mankind, … building a better human being or a better society, instead of solely entertaining or surprising the viewer,” I have owned a dozen of his works including a life-sized Socrates that still lives in Ithaca, the soul of my educational life, and now both a stone and metal buffalo in my foyer and a larger-than-life wood and metal eagle that looks over my back hillside from my bedroom balcony.
I have never really been a collector of art for art’s sake (Ars Gratia Artis as displayed on the MGM lion head logo). This metaphysical philosophy about the disconnectivity of art, as first expressed by Gautier, has never resonated with me. To me, I buy or create art for emotional reasons. It speaks to me, it speaks to my soul, if you will. I met Tomaszewski several times both in his studio and when he installed Socrates for me at my Ithaca home. He told me that he created his works by wandering through his wooded property and seeing things that reminded him of things past including images, beings or emotions. He would take that thing (usually a stone or large piece of wood) and sculpt around it to give shape to that image or emotion and thereby imbue it with the energy of his soul. His eagle that stands watch over my hillside now acts as a home (at its feet) for nesting doves and protects them while it oversees my hillside. I looked out and saw a boulder that spoke to me of a resting buffalo on the chaparral (what am I but such a beast), so I commissioned a 500-pound metal buffalo head, tail and hoof and turned that into my Bison Boulder. She is my larger-than-life alter-ego at the base of the hill that stares purposefully at my eagle up above and vice versa.
Family, friends and neighbors always wonder what it is that drives me to create whatever you want to call what I have created on my hillside. They cannot imagine why I do it. I can explain the pathways (access and exercise), the benches (rest and contemplation), the pottery (visual accents), the boulder art (adding interest and connectivity to big old boulders that are everywhere), and even the metal artwork (a release of emotion that finds energy within nature and gives it expression). But what about the final element of distraction, the wind spinners? I have three in my Cecil Garden (I say they tell me whether the wind is coming from the Santa Ana’s or the Pacific, just as Mary Poppins would want to know) and now ten more spinners on the lower hillside. These spinners all provide motion to the back hillside at all times of the day in keeping with whatever nature delivers us, mostly from the intersection of desert heat, cool ocean waters and the hills and valley that guard and mix the two in nature’s dance of weather.
Everything about my life is an emotional outlet, so why should my gardening and my back hillside be any different? I guess the spinners are my jiggling leg syndrome brought to life in my garden, in absentia.